Brothers

“Cedar Rapids” and “Of Gods and Men.”

John C. Reilly, Ed Helms, and Anne Heche in a movie directed by Miguel Arteta.Credit Illustration by ANDY FRIEDMAN

The hero of “Cedar Rapids” is Tim Lippe (Ed Helms). If cinema teaches us anything, it is that no tough guy has ever borne the name of Tim—hence the lofty enchanter in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who, having hurled exploding thunderbolts, ruins the effect by declaring, “There are some who call me . . . Tim.” As for Lippe, it is pronounced “Lippy,” which suggests a family pet. Here is a passive soul who will take whatever punches life may throw at him and then apologize for having got in the way. He works in Brown Valley, Wisconsin, for Brown Star Insurance—again, the tag is perfect, with any twinkle of excitement snuffed out by the drabness of the hue. Tim is a bachelor, and can be identified as such by his knitwear. He does have a lover, Macy Vanderhei (Sigourney Weaver), which sounds promising (“We’re basically pre-engaged,” he says), but she was his teacher in middle school, and her attitude toward him could best be described as matronizing. Macy goes on top.

So we have our fish. And we have the near-stagnant water in which he swims. To what maelstrom will the movie steer him? To Cedar Rapids, Iowa, which may not be Bangkok but which for Tim is a white-water ride. He goes there for an annual convention of insurance agents, and his task is to bring back the prize for professional integrity, which has been awarded three years running to Brown Star. With this in mind, he befriends the pious president of the insurers’ association, Orin Helgesson (Kurtwood Smith), and it’s unfortunate that their first encounter should be in the men’s locker room, near the hotel pool. He and Orin exchange a naked handshake; their gaucherie, like so many embarrassments in the film, is the stuff of frat-house farce, yet what grips the director, Miguel Arteta, is not so much the gross-out as the tamp-down—the stumbles and stutters with which men, especially courteous ones, seek to negotiate the unsightly bumps of existence.

No one is more courteous than Ronald Wilkes (Isiah Whitlock, Jr.), the gentleman with whom Tim shares a room at the hotel. Ronald’s idea of a wild night is to watch what he refers to as “the HBO program ‘The Wire.’ ” (The kicker here is that Whitlock played Clay Davis, the decidedly ungentle state senator in the show.) Also bunking down with Tim and Ronald is Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly), the convention’s leading loudmouth, who heads directly to the Horizons bar—another sad label—and knocks back shots with Joan (Anne Heche), a regular at these events. Better known as Foxy, and not just for the flourish of her long copper hair, she turns out to have a husband and children back home—plus, I would guess, a cousin named Alex, the heroine of “Up in the Air,” who suffered from the same array of secrets, lusts, and lies.

Indeed, the hardiest joke in “Cedar Rapids” is just how brazenly derivative it is. That is not an indictment; people who seriously expect movies to be original should find themselves another art form. Of all the charges laid at the feet of “Avatar,” for instance, that of unoriginality was the weakest. If anything, our pleasure sprang from seeing creaky old tropes being given spiffy new wings, and a similar conservatism—the comfort of familiar feelings, that is, not of political dogma—runs through “Cedar Rapids,” though without the help of dragons. What could be more well-worn than the path that leads a hero to burst free of his moral enclosure? Why are we gratified, not wearied, to realize that the noisome Dean, under the babble of his randy bluster, and despite his railing against “this God-and-community bullshit,” is truly a man of honor? For heaven’s sake, there’s even a hooker named Bree (Alia Shawkat), presumably an echo of the Bree played by Jane Fonda in “Klute,” and what is her heart made of? You guessed it.

“Cedar Rapids,” written by Phil Johnston, has the courage of these clichés, though some of the brushstrokes seem too broad by half. I didn’t buy the idea that Tim has never flown before, that he would be scared of handing over a credit card at the hotel, and that he shies away at his first sight of Ronald, an African-American, in his room. This is 2011, and, in a networked world, you have to wonder how long the figure of the untrammelled rube can hope to survive. The trammelling that Tim undergoes—it involves sex, drugs, midnight bathing, and, most daring of all, cream sherry—is, needless to say, the making of him, and our band of insurance brothers is duly loosened up and bonded. “Cedar Rapids” is certainly a guys’ movie, yet it leaves us with the unmistakable impression that men are simple engines, far more easily fixed than women; there is something unredeemed in the faces of Joan, Bree, and Macy—a thwartedness that no merry gallivant, whether in Wisconsin or in Iowa, is going to assuage. A single shot of Miss Vanderhei taking a pottery class opens up a whole vista of ennui, and the high point for poor Bree comes when Tim declares love with the words “Your eyes are like brown oceans.” Nice going, Timbo. Try another color.

There are plenty of males, and lots of bonding, too, throughout “Of Gods and Men,” but the heroes of Xavier Beauvois’s film are more celibate than even Tim Lippe would think proper. They are French monks, living and praying in the clear blue air of the Atlas Mountains. This movie can hardly help being beautiful, in such a rarefied domain, but what matters is that it never looks merely beautiful. Below the monastery, and linked to it by a flight of concrete steps, is a ramshackle village of poor Muslims, who regularly walk up to help the monks with manual labor and, in turn, to receive their succor and support. The women, particularly, bring their children to be treated by Brother Luc (Michael Lonsdale), who dispenses medicine, benignity, and shoes. The number of good films about the workings of faith is pitifully small; the number that manage to dramatize interfaith harmony without sliding into a mush of unknowingness is smaller still. Like the monks’ home, this film stands almost alone.

From the start, we fear for that harmony, and rightly so. Word filters through of Islamist provocation in the district. As the threat creeps closer, the monks, guided by the scholarly Brother Christian (Lambert Wilson), debate whether to stay or to go, deciding in the end to remain and continue their service to the locals. I like the unabashed wordiness of their argument, as the demands of duty are wrestled with, at length. It means that we are struck with added force by the majestic scene, one of purest sound and vision, which finds the brothers chanting defiantly in their chapel as a helicopter clatters overhead. That is a threatening gesture from the military, which suspects the community of treating wounded fundamentalists—an act of treachery in the eyes of the state, but an act of faith for Luc, who cannot, in all conscience, choose whom he heals.

Michael Lonsdale is almost eighty now. This great man has worked for Welles, Truffaut, Buñuel, and Louis Malle. He was the cop in “The Day of the Jackal,” the villain in “Moonraker,” and the sage in “Ronin.” He looms like a bear, yet he moves without clumsiness or haste. His voice is deep, graced here and there with cadenzas of lightness and humor. He looks like someone who knows all the mysteries of the universe but has decided, in the interests of public order and private amusement, to keep them to himself. In short, he makes one heck of a monk. Brother Luc, we feel, will pass judgment on no sins but his own—always a challenge and an irritant, when those around you are casting the first stone. What happens to him, and his good companions, is foretold by a devastating sentence from Pascal, which we hear Luc read: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it for religious conviction.”

The story is founded on the true case of seven Cistercian monks who were kidnapped and beheaded during the Algerian civil war of the nineteen-nineties. The fate of the men in the movie is much less specific and savage, though no less haunting. Why, then, should they seem neither defeated nor destroyed? Perhaps because Beauvois has used his film to honor their glad resilience and the pattern of their days—broken, typically, by Brother Luc, who, as the end draws nigh, opens two bottles of wine, at dinner, and, in place of the customary spiritual readings, puts on a recording of “Swan Lake.” I’m not sure I believe the scene, yet the belief that it enshrines feels true; the monks are saying farewell to worldly things, drinking deep of passing joys. As a result, the Tchaikovsky means more, and rings out more resoundingly, in this one excerpt than it does in the whole of “Black Swan.” There it accompanied the dancer in her final fragmenting of self, engrossed in her own mirror image. Here it shows men of older plumage, preparing calmly, even joyfully, to take flight and leave their selves behind. ♦